Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen and global reporter, died this week in a Kharkov prison eight months after he was arrested for the crime of speaking the truth about what was happening in Ukraine. Under Secretary of State Vickie Nuland, despised Gonzalo, as did Zelensky. People from around the world, who had been informed by Gonzalo’s reports, interviews and articles asked their governments to assist. None apparently did, and most certainly his own government – the one led by Dark Brandon and the Democrats and the war-loving, truth- hating Republicans – did absolutely nothing.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The US government downplayed the arrest and the conditions, and denied that Lira was a journalist (along the lines of similar denials relating to Julian Assange). The progressive liberal Daily Beast did several attack pieces on Gonzalo before and after his detention. Oh, and he was a smoker too. Just as the Australian government has been of no help to their cruelly and wrongly imprisoned citizen Julian Assange, our own government was of zero assistance to Gonzalo Lira. He was isolated from and received no attention or advocacy by the many US State Department officers in Ukraine. Perhaps they were too busy handing out US taxpayer cash and paychecks to the Ukrainian government and Zelensky’s cronies. We may never know the truth.
What we do know, and may learn from Gonzalo’s death at the hands of the Joe Biden administration and their puppet dictator in Kiev, is that rule of law and the duties of the state to its citizens that one might presume from a casual reading of the US Constitution, is dead, dry, decayed, decrepit, and damned to hell.
There is no rule of law that the US government honors, foreign or domestic. There is no duty that the US government acknowledges to its citizens. Everything, except aid to Zelensky and Netanyahu, is 100% conditional.
We see this in the US-fueled and -funded genocide in Gaza, where 90 percent of the population has not just been relocated into a tiny portion of South Gaza, where they are still targeted by bombs and snipers. The IDF – using US arms, munitions and aircraft, as well as intelligence and targeting assistance and programming for the 2 F-35 squadrons for example – has razed the homes in the north and central parts of the Gaza strip; dislocated Palestinians have no place to return to, and no way of rebuilding those homes as Israel controls as it has for decades, all trade with and imports to Gaza.
Palestinians are “human animals” and “wild beasts” according to Netanyahu. It’s a damn good thing that we live in a Christian country, and it’s a damn good thing that the left progressive wing of the government is pushing equality, anti-discrimination, and never hurting anyone’s feelings. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in a country that murdered recklessly, neglectfully, in both anger and when caught up in absent-minded national fugue.
Biden and his executive state murdered Gonzalo Lira – it intended to silence him forever, it refused to demand his release (billions and billions to Zelensky were never enough). Zelensky and Netanyahu share the stage as unhinged, deranged recipients of billions of US taxpayer dollars, no strings attached ever. It’s the way our foreign policy works, send money, look into crystal balls, murmur and huddle, and hope for more war, more murder, more chaos as the United States runs out its own clock.
The lesson we must take is both national and macro, and also extremely local and personal. The context of Gonzalo’s murder at the hands of our allies in Ukraine should have been enough to ensure we are not surprised. This context includes US extradition demands for Julian Assange for non- crimes except for angering the US government, and the targeted IDF murders of over 80 Palestinian and Arab journalists in Gaza and elsewhere in the region, so far. The context includes the legal warfare against the leading GOP candidate, former President Donald Trump conducted by Democratic controlled state governments. The context include the FBI’s and Justice Department obsession with caging anyone in DC (or elsewhere) who they believe conducted an “armed insurrection to overthrow the US government,” on Jan 6, 2021, albeit with pepper spray and sticks, while being led into the government buildings between velvet ropes by friendly security guards. Except for their own inserted federal stooges, of course. The context includes FBI setups and staging of a variety of false flags around the country, as well as the FBI and Justice Department refusal to address burning cities throughout the country as a result of 2020 elections and afterwards.
This context communicates clearly that theUS government makes the rules, and that we are all subjects, not citizens. We work for government; it does not work for us. We serve government, at a minimum, by obeying it. If we refuse to obey, we lose all expectation of any rights, as either citizen or subject.
Gonzalo’s death at the hands of Dark Brandon’s State Department and our best Ukraine ally is an echo of what goes on wherever the US government has influence. Many journalists and others who simply write and speak their truth have been exiled, punished, imprisoned, denied the ability to speak, write or communicate or to monetize their communicative and investigative work – simply because the US government does not like truth, free association, or freedom in general.
The mass surveillance state wars with us on every front. Big tech and social media collusion with government seeks to control the message and elevate the government narrative of the day. It subjugates or deplatforms all questioning, views, data, facts, and messaging that does not serve the approved narrative.
The lesson we must take from this is that you, as an American citizen, must expect nothing from your government by virtue of your citizen status. Instead, you will be judged as either a compliant advocate of the state, or else a noncompliant challenge to the state. If the latter, then jail, injustice, denial of an ability to make a living, denial of your free speech and any expectations of free speech, perhaps a taking of your existing property, and most certainly abandonment by all offices administering justice is what you will receive, and must expect.
I always love to hear the song, “The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia.” The lyrics tell a fun story, but they are also share a well recognized tale of the state’s application of justice, and the valuelessness of people unconnected to and unvalued by that state. There are literally hundreds of anti-state songs and lyrics, acceptable movies, better movies, channels, journalists and resources out there. Perhaps you hang on to a bit of trust in the state, despite all evidence that the state can not be trusted. Open your eyes to the sheer murderousness of the regime that we ourselves live under today.
Our president exists in a revolving disassociate fugue, surrounded by sociopaths. The world they live in, as we saw with the recent episode of “Who’s Running the Pentagon?” is one where self-centeredness has evolved into uniformed narcissism – where every government employee stares admiringly into their reflections all day long, and become annoyed and angry if anyone suggests they have a responsibility to serve the nation.
This is the reality. I will miss hearing from Gonzalo Lira, and his example, his courage and his honesty as a reporter of the world he saw and lived.
But what his death illuminates about our own country and its disgusting government, and the entrenched bureaucratic state we must not miss – it is staring us down, intimidating us as best it can, accountable to no citizen, and doing no governing that any honest person can recognize or admit.
In honor of Gonzalo, we should commit and re-commit to separate ourselves from the state, disrespect the state, become even more cynical about what the state says, demands, decries, exclaims, exhorts, denies and cajoles. All the state demands is equally outrageous, equally degrading to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and equally immoral and unethical. We may in the past have said, upon witnessing something that makes sense from our government, that “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Stop that. The state has proven itself far more dangerous to life itself than a broken clock could ever be.
It is a massive murder machine, targeting the weak and the unruly, the truthteller and the inconvenient. Nearly all of us have seen some shade, some degree of this machine in our own lives, in our encounters with law enforcement or the courts, the local government, state or national enforcers of the millions of laws that serve the state and bind up the citizen simply because that it its intent.
This death machine wishes to persist and grow – if it is right twice a day it is because of the actions of humanity, the humans in the system, rather than by its design. We the people are its only enemy – the wars that start and stop, at home and abroad, are all designed to prosecute the one real war of the state, a constant war against the people.
All Presidents have blood on their hands, as do many employees of those various regimes. But Biden, perhaps because he is an imbecilic dottering old man being led around by his sociopathic spouse, may actually be a gift to future generations who cherish liberty. Biden allows us to transparently see and bear witness to the demonic evil of the state. In his current condition, Biden honestly cannot be blamed, because the state isn’t listening to him (or letting him know what’s happening) any more than it is listening to or informing the rest of us.
One of my favorite books is Deep Survival – an analysis of who survives and who doesn’t in extreme conditions. Many books and training programs, even movies and documentaries exist that discuss this same topic – but the first step – common in all of these situations – is to clearly recognize the actual risk and danger of your situation. Pollyanna thinking doesn’t work – as in any recovery, first you must recognize you are at the bottom of the hole, understand your choices are limited to none, and the risk of death is real and it is imminent. At that point, clear thinking and commitment to recovery and survival is able to be imagined, and then it is able, sometimes, to be accomplished. Fail this first step, an honest personal assessment of your situation, and survival becomes unlikely.
If we are thinking of Gonzalo’s death at the hands of the US and Ukraine, much as we might consider the deaths of 30,000 nameless Gazans at the hands of the US and Israel, let us as Americans benefit from the shock, the sense of helplessness, and perhaps a growing sense of panic. We are permanently connected to those killed and murdered by our government, connected as a murderer is connected to his or her victim. Because the US government calls itself a democracy, rather than an oligarchical corporate monopoly of force sitting atop 330 million people with brains, energy, and dreams of their own – this means we murder if our government does. If this is unacceptable to you, you know what to do.
Become ungovernable. Shun the state, discover old ways and create new ways of separating yourself from it. Discourage our best and brightest, and our worst and slowest, from government service of any kind. Refuse to grant the state even the generosity of spirit by referring to it as broken clock, occasionally correct through no action of its own. The US government, indeed the state itself, is most definitely not yet broken, and it is causing the kind of damage that will send us all to hell. Each of us must take time, every day, to renew our war against the state, in spirit, academically, economically, in our lives and communities, and separate ourselves from it. We must do so ourselves, and help others to do so, in whatever ways they can. Only in this way can we honor the dead that our government has already murdered, in our name and with our money.
RIP, Gonzalo.